America and the failed promise of Liberty: Blacks and the Politics of Policing
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
Despite claims by scholars such as Michel Foucault and others that contemporary ideas about law enforcement and police officers as paid functionaries of the state were formulated by French and German scholars and practitioners in politics and public administration during the 17th and early 18th centuries, London’s Sir Robert Peel’s concept of policing served as a template for American law enforcement, at least, in the northern cities.[1] The first established professional police force was in Boston, Massachusetts in 1838, followed by New York City in 1844, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans, Louisiana and Cincinnati, Ohio in 1853, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1855 and Newark, NJ and Baltimore, Maryland in 1857 (Balko 2014; Hahn and Jeffries 2003). By the 1880s, all major U.S. cities had municipal police forces in place (Waxman 2017). While America’s policing paradigm owes its origins to European thinkers, what the architects of American policing did not adopt was the Bobbies bedside manner, which was one of civility, cooperation, and respect. Despite the Bobbies gentile disposition, the London Metropolitan Police force created in 1829, had as its objective, not to protect ordinary citizens from harm per se, but to protect “the propertied classes from the rabble” (Vitale 2018).
In America, unlike in Europe, police officers have always carried guns[2], thus establishing an asymmetrical relationship between the police and the public, whereby the police officer is the boss and the motorist and/or pedestrian is the subordinate (Hahn and Jeffries 2003). Simply put, the power dynamic is glaringly one-sided. This, despite the fact that police officer salaries are explicitly paid with taxpayer dollars. Still, civilians are expected to be respectful of police officers at all times, address them as sir or ma’am, comply with the officer’s directives, and obey all commands and instructions no matter how unnecessary or ego-driven the civilian believes them to be. The expectation of unquestioned adherence to the authority granted to law enforcement is the “price” to pay for public safety. This type of socialization, for many Americans, starts at an early age. In fact, there are few elementary, middle, or junior high schools[3] in America that do not feature police officers during career days when students are exposed to a variety of different occupations and professionals. Then, of course, there are the occasional visits from “Officer Friendly” as he was affectionately called when the first author was in elementary school in the mid-1970s. During these visits, students are inculcated with the message that police officers are scrupulously honest and people of extremely high character; that they risk their lives to help others and are brave men and women. “Officer Friendly” was part of the School Resource Officer[4] movement that took off in the 1960s with the express purpose of revitalizing the image of local law enforcement in the eyes of the public. Being a police officer is a noble and honorable profession, is the message in which children were ingrained. The notion of police officers as “good helpers” and “community servants” is a dominant narrative in police-community relations programming and governmental recognition. The advent of National Peace Officers Memorial Day in 1962 by the Kennedy Administration reinforced that message. Other efforts designed to exhibit the softer and more compassionate side of police officers include police athletic leagues (PALS), gang resistance education and training (GREAT), and perhaps the most widely known Dare[5] program, an effort founded by Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates in conjunction with the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1983 (Gates 1992).[6]
In America, the reverence shown to police officers is arguably unlike that of any other public servant. In fact, we know of no public figure with the exception of judges to whom we as Americans afford a greater amount of respect, so much so, that Americans are taught, again, early on, not only to be deferential but unassuming and submissive in the presence of a police officer (Sykes and Clark 1975). The slightest deviation from these protocols could, and often makes for an uncomfortable interaction. This is especially true for Blacks[7] who are, and this is no exaggeration, oftentimes expected to genuflect in the presence of a police officer, especially if the police officer is white. While questioning or verbally challenging a police officer is not something to which Whites are impervious, Blacks are taught to refrain from adopting such a posture, for doing so could lead to a deadly encounter. Consequently, Black kids, particularly Black males are taught early on how to comport themselves while in the presence of a police officer. The Talk, as it is known, is a sit-down, oftentimes between parent and child, whereupon the child is taught, among other things, to avoid making sudden moves, keep one’s hands in plain sight, be compliant and make an effort to be extra courteous.[8]
Blacks’ contentious relationship with white police officers in America is something with which Blacks are all too familiar. Some have even maintained that Blacks’ relationship with white police officers is a by-product of the same system that produced slavery and Jim Crow. Said another way, the history of racial discrimination in the U.S. implicates American policing from its inception. Indeed, law enforcement agencies were tasked with various roles in the control of certain citizens, enforcing unjust racist laws and policies.
Literature Review
Given the manner in which White Police-Black community relations have taken center stage in American politics over the past several years, it is no surprise that the issue of police brutality has saturated the pages of many popular magazines, newspapers, refereed journal articles, and scholarly books. Some of the most original and thought-provoking scholarship on police brutality and the Black community, however, has been produced in the last decade. Where, once the issue of police brutality was considered the domain of social scientists and perhaps historians, scholars in a variety of different disciplines have entered the fray, adding much-needed fresh perspectives (Ehrenfeld and Harris 2020). Whereas writers have typically featured case studies and the circumstances around which certain Blacks were beaten (such as Rodney King in 1991) and/or killed by White police officers, authors have recently taken to exploring such topics as the impact of police brutality on the mental and physical health of Blacks (Aymer 2016). Other writers have adopted a similar approach, but expanded it, such that scholars are deeming it important to measure the collateral damage that results from police use of excessive force against residents in Black communities (Graham et al. 2020; Bor, et al., Alang et al. 2017). Simply put, police brutality is now being studied in its relation to Black ecosystems. How police use of excessive force adversely impacts the lives of the victims’ friends, families, and loved ones as well as the environments is finally garnering the attention it deserves.
Some have likened the murders of Black and brown bodies by White police officers to the lynching of Blacks in America when, during earlier periods in the country’s history, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black communities throughout the south and various other parts of the US (Embrick 2015). Angles that scholars haven’t devoted much time to include the ways in which the country’s founding fathers and the framers of America’s most sacrosanct documents—the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and the U.S. Constitution, fomented a climate via their writings that gave rise to an ideology that, still today, manifests in the ways many White police officers treat Blacks in America. This coupled with the history of policing and its role in the preservation of slavery formed the basis of American public philosophy (Toynbee 1935), where whites are taught that Blacks are inferior at best and little more than subhuman creatures at worst. Against this backdrop, that White police officers are killing unarmed Blacks at an alarming rate more than 150 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, is telling, but not altogether surprising.
Hypothesis
It is, for this reason, we argue that despite the gains made by Blacks in America, including the election of the country’s only black president in Barack Obama, Blacks still do not enjoy the same rights, neither man-made nor those (inalienable rights) bestowed by God, like their white counterparts, including that of Liberty. If Liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views, then the disproportionate killings of Blacks by white American police officers are illustrative of the fact that African Americans have never experienced Liberty. In order to help the reader properly contextualize the murder of Blacks by White police officers, a brief history of the Black predicament is in order.
Black Life in America: A Truncated History
It is widely agreed upon that the concept of human rights is among America’s most significant debts to the Enlightenment period. Often quoted passages from the Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Citizen are part of the American lexicon: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights . . . The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.’ These and similar declarations provide a framework for human rights that Lynn Hunt (2007) has concluded thusly: ‘Human rights require three interlocking qualities: rights must be natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for everyone), and universal (applicable everywhere and at all times).’ Except where Blacks are concerned.
There is a long history of forced and/or government sanctioned Black servitude in the U.S. that dates back as early as 1619 when the first group of Africans was snatched from their homelands and transported to the Americas for the purpose of extracting their labor. In fact, in July of that year, officials from eleven large New World settlements met in Jamestown, Virginia, in order to establish the policies and procedures that ultimately laid the foundation for the brand of democracy they endeavored to create. Weeks later, at nearby Point Comfort, a few dozen Angolan men and women were unloaded and sold to white men by Portuguese slave traders (Lemon, 2021). Few can deny that slave labor and/or manumission was the basis on which democracy was formulated and America’s economy was built, from the Precolonial era up to the Industrial Revolution. America became the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world because she harnessed, for more than two hundred years, the free labor of millions of Black human beings. Even after slavery was abolished, Blacks were still forced to abide by the mores, customs, and unwritten rules that governed the era known as Jim Crow. Specifically, Blacks were subjected to a tripartite system of government whereby they were oppressed politically, economically, and socially (Morris 1984). For example, in the area of electoral politics, although Blacks’ efforts to exercise the franchise were bolstered in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, their attempts to do so were still thwarted in the South by those who were determined to keep the voting rolls lily-white. Gone were such impediments to voting such as poll taxes[9], literacy tests[10], white primaries[11], and grandfather clauses.[12] However, in their absence whites took to intimidation tactics such as cross burnings, physical harassment, the burning and bombing of churches, and death threats intended to discourage Blacks from registering to vote, let alone actually voting. Blacks who participated in civil rights activities faced reprisals at work. Bank presidents threatened to call in the balance on loans and school boards threatened teachers with termination.
Socially, Blacks were expected to be docile and submissive. They were required to sit in the back of the bus and/or trolley and relinquish their seats in order to allow whites to sit. There were separate restrooms and water fountains. They were expected to enter white-owned establishments and houses through the back door if they were allowed to enter at all. Black men were prohibited from looking into the eyes of white women or else be charged with rape and black women were for all intents and purposes, defenseless against a white man’s advances. And, if that wasn’t enough, both Black men and Black women were expected to address whites as Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, even if the white person in question was considerably younger.
Blacks who stood up for themselves were considered militant, those who eked out a successful living were often characterized as uppity and those who failed to show the proper amount of deference were seen as belligerent and disrespectful. Any of these perceived transgressions might lead to a physical assault or worst, death by hanging or other means, depending on the infraction. In short, Blacks were expected to know their place, every day was a constant reminder of that fact. And while it is no longer socially acceptable for Whites to expect Blacks to defer to them, we are of the opinion that some Whites (more than we as a Nation care to admit) secretly (or not so secretly) long for a return to days-gone-by when Blacks were routinely and publicly referred to as N----rs and openly treated as non-citizens.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Some would argue that much has changed since the passage of the 1964 public accommodations act, outlawing discrimination in public places. Measures such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 as well as racially compensatory programs such as affirmative action have, in many ways, altered the country’s social, political, and economic landscape for the better. Indeed, a great deal has changed but not as much as some would have us believe. As alluded to earlier, Liberty, for example, as an inalienable and natural right bestowed upon all humans at birth, is something that has continued to elude Blacks. This may explain in part the reason why not only has police violence against Blacks seemingly not abated but appears to be more heinous and vicious in nature than ever before. One could argue that death by a police officer has replaced lynching-once whites’ preferred method for keeping Blacks in their place.
When slavery ended, whites agreed that their continued supremacy largely depended on the practice of lynching.[13] Between 1882, just five years after Reconstruction, and 1903 there was a proliferation in the number of Blacks being hanged (1384) in the South (White 1929, 1969). And between 1918 and 1927, 92 percent of all persons who were lynched in the U.S. were Black (Marable 1983). As years passed and lynching came to an end, whites began to rely almost exclusively on the state to maintain white supremacy. Consequently, police departments were given carte blanche in policing Black communities, resulting in daily acts of brutality against Blacks (White 1929; 1969). Like lynching, murder by police reflects a belief in racial superiority that reinforces Black subjugation, resulting in a systemic pattern of injustice (Marable 1983). A recently discovered taped conversation between two white Wilmington, NC police officers does little to undermine this assertion. Said one officer to another, unbeknownst that he was being recorded:
“We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them f---ing N-----s.
I can’t wait. God, I can’t wait.” The office added “a civil war is needed to
“wipe em off the f-----g map. That’ll put em back about four to five generations” (McReynolds 2020).
While it is difficult to ascertain whether or not this sentiment is reflective of most white police officers within the Wilmington Police Department, one cannot ignore the department’s sordid racial history. Case in point: In 1898, a slate of Black and progressive-minded whites ran for and won various state and local offices with the support of the Fusion Party, a vehicle spear-headed by North Carolina agricultural leader Marion Butler who combined the Populist and Republican parties there in the state. The Wilmington police force responded by driving the lawmakers out of office, their homes, and their communities. When the dust settled an untold number of Black legislators and whites were murdered, clearing the way for the police force and its white supporters to install their own White supremacist candidates in place of those who were duly elected (Lemon, 2021).
As alluded to earlier, it appears that more Blacks are being killed unjustifiably so, by white police officers than in past years. Although police use of excessive force has always been, for Blacks, a major public health crisis, it wasn't until the 1991 beating of twenty-five-year-old Rodney King that the issue of police brutality was thrust into the national spotlight. In the spring of that year, King led members of the Los Angeles Police Department and California-Highway Patrol on a high-speed chase. At the end of the chase, the unarmed King was savagely beaten by four white LAPD officers resulting in broken bones, a fractured eye socket, and severe nerve damage. King was struck more than 60 times while lying on the ground. A nearby resident, George Holliday, happened to see the incident from his balcony across the street; alarmed at what he saw, Holliday grabbed his video recorder and began filming. Holliday sold the footage to a local news station and within days, the recording was broadcast around the world. The reaction on the part of many was one of horror.
Until the Rodney King beating, many Whites were either unwilling to believe or admit that police officers were capable of this kind of behavior. They refused to believe that police officers would mercilessly beat another human being senseless. This, despite the fact that for years, Blacks had tried unsuccessfully to convince the wider public that police violence against them was not an abnormality, but an all too common occurrence. In fact, in the years leading up to the beating, from 1986 to 1991, the Justice Department received nearly 8,000 complaints each year concerning civil rights violations by police officers (U.S. Congress House Committee 1991). It should be noted that this number represented only a fraction of the actual police abuses, as many motorists and pedestrians opt not to file grievances, believing they won’t be taken seriously. Sadly, investigations of police departments in many of the country’s major cities reveal that racism and brutality are widespread and often tolerated by departments commanders (Parenti 1995). In the city of Los Angeles, for example, from 1986 through 1990, allegations of excessive force or improper tactics were filed against approximately 1,800 officers, more than 1,400 of whom had one or more previous complaints; 183 officers had four or more allegations lodged against them, 44 had six or more, 16 had eight or more, and one officer had sixteen complaints (Report of the Independent Commission 1991).
Police brutality is so widespread, that many mid-major and small cities with police departments actually purchase insurance policies that pay money to people who have been subjected to police abuse (Rappapor 2016). Major cities, on the other hand, self-insure, which means they allocate a certain amount of money to be used for that purpose. Paul Butler astutely points out that such a development raises an issue academics refer to as 'moral hazard,' as police department officials may be less likely to encourage their officers to exercise restraint, for paying for brutality is already accounted for in the budget (Butler 2017).
The King Video as Deterrent: Fact or Fiction?
Given the negative publicity that the LAPD incurred worldwide, with the circulation of the video showing the officers striking King repeatedly as he posed no threat, as well as the criticism of American policing in general, one might have expected police officers to be more conscientious of their behavior when interacting with civilians for fear of being caught on film. In recent years, City governments have invested millions of dollars in officer body-worn camera technologies to, in part, increase police transparency while interacting with citizens. A randomized controlled trial involving 2, 224 Washington, DC police officers measured the impact of the body-worn cameras and found that there was no appreciable difference in officer behavior, including the decision to employ the use of force (Yokum, Ravishankar and Coppock 2017).
Since 1991, when the King video saturated the news, there is no indication that police violence by white police officers against Blacks has subsided, if anything it seems to have intensified in ferocity and scope. Case in point. In late August 2020 a white Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer shot 29-year-old Jacob Blake, an African American, in the back several times as he walked away from the officer and tried to enter his vehicle. Video shows that Blake posed no threat to the officer, yet the officer claimed he feared for his life. Blake is paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. The District Attorney announced that no charges would be filed against the Kenosha police officer. The DA stated that he believed officer Rustin Sheskey exercised his “privilege of self-defense” by shooting Blake as he walked away.
Given the number of times Blake was shot at point-blank range, he is fortunate to have survived the encounter. Other Blacks have not fared as well. According to the work of Anthropologist Cody Ross, unarmed African Americans are three and a half times more likely to be shot than unarmed whites (Ross 2015). Moreover, since 2015, police officers[14] have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women. The exact number of Blacks who have been killed unjustly by white police officers over the last 30 years since the King video thrust police use of excessive force against Blacks into the international spotlight, is difficult to know. Concerned citizens are told that the reason there is no accurate data on the numbers of people U.S. police departments kill is that there is no federal database that tracks the number of people of any race killed by the police. Butler goes on to say, “of course police departments themselves know exactly how many people their officers have killed” (Butler 2017, 54). It’s just that police departments are not required to make said data available to the public. What follows is a sampling of some of the names of unarmed Black civilians whose lives were snuffed out by white police officers since the beating of Rodney King in 1991, despite posing no threat.
Explaining irrational behavior, logically
In this age of heightened citizen surveillance, why do white police officers continue to kill Blacks despite knowing that the possibility of being filmed[15] is significantly greater now than in 1991? Video footage of police officers behaving badly has not significantly increased the number of prosecutions of police officers since the beating of Rodney King thirty years ago, mainly because, the state has historically shielded police officers from punitive measures in cases of officers’ use of extra-legal force. Policing, as an institution, insulates officers from personal criminal liability and training protocols in order to justify lethal force (Stinson 2020). The problem with holding police officers accountable, especially white police officers, is compounded when the victim is Black. Could it be that some white police officers view Blacks as noncitizens at best or some type of subhuman creature at worst? Is it that the increased depiction (albeit fictionalized) of Blacks, especially Black males as dangerous criminals allows for wide latitude in the harsh policing of Blacks, including that of murder? If so, this may explain why a white NYC police officer sodomized and tortured Abner Louima in a Brooklyn police station with a toilet plunger-ramming the stick into his rectum causing damage to his intestines, while shouting “stupid nigger, I’m going to teach you how to respect cops” (Thompson 1999, 160). If the officer saw Louima as a creature, his perspective is not a novel one, as this thinking is not without historic precedent. After all, Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution declared that any person who was not free would be counted of three-fifths of a man for the purposes of determining congressional representation. Second, it is possible that some police officers see themselves as representatives and guardians of the white race who are performing their civic and moral duty, that is, cleansing the Nation of those whom whites deem undesirable.[16]
In the minds of some white police officers, this line of supremacist thinking is consistent with whites’ view of Blacks, historically. In 1968, for example, two Purdue University scholars who studied white peoples’ perceptions of Blacks were surprised at what they found. For example, only 27 percent of white Americans would protest the mass arrest and imprisonment of Blacks even in the absence of a crime (Streufert and Nogami 1970). Putting Siegfried Streufert and Glenda Y. Nogami’s findings in context, Rodney Stark and James McEvay III wrote in a 1970s issue of Psychology Today: “The overwhelming majority of White Americans would apparently be “good Germans” if the government turned to massive social repression…Blacks would be wiped out ...” (Stark and McEvoy 1970, 111). Said straightforwardly, some police officers may genuinely believe they are carrying out the will of “the people” and therefore, see their actions, not as criminal, but legitimate. An example of this occurred the day after Mother’s Day in 1985, in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Police officers attempted to evict MOVE, a Black back-to-nature socially conscious group, from a house in West Philadelphia. MOVE refused to leave and allegedly threatened the police with guns (May 1985). The police surrounded the house and attempted to force MOVE out of it with high-pressure water hoses. After several hours of spraying and 750,000 tons of water proved unable to do the job, the police conducted an air raid. Using a helicopter, they dropped an incendiary device composed of TOVEX mining explosive on the roof of the house (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). The blaze that followed killed seven MOVE members and four of their children and leveled an entire city block, destroying sixty homes and leaving 240 people homeless (“MOVE House is Bombed 1985). Inexplicably, one White west coast police chief told a national audience on CBS’s Face the Nation that approving the bombing had made Philadelphia’s Mayor a “hero” who “should run for national office” because he had shown “some of the finest leadership I’ve ever seen from a politician” (May 1985). As a decorated police chief who lorded over one of the nation’s most highly regarded or infamous (depending on one’s perspective) police departments, his comments were taken seriously by many within the law enforcement community.
In terms of the theory of natural law, government actions, according to political commentator Walter Lippman, are legitimate to the extent that they are in accord with the “public philosophy” (Lippman 1955, 42). According to democratic theory, government actions derive their legitimacy from the extent to which they embody the will of the people (Huntington 1968). Seldom do institutional interests run counter to public sentiment. This may explain in part why police officers believe that no matter how egregious and unlawful their actions, the state will protect them[17], of which police unions are a part. In New York, for example, police officers charged with brutality or excessive force are given ample time to prepare alibis. The little-known clause called the “48-hour rule” has been part of the police officer “bill of rights” portion of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association contract since 1969 (Thompson 1991). Under this provision, an officer under investigation, whether by the New York Police Department or any other investigating agency, is not required to cooperate for 48 hours. In effect, this rule affords an officer temporary immunity from interrogation that no civilian would have under similar circumstances. Suffice to say, rules such as this one, hinders investigations of cases involving excessive force, especially those cases where civilians die under bizarre circumstances. That said, rarely do officials bring charges against police officers for unlawful shootings. And seldom are unlawful shootings called what they are, “unlawful shootings.”
Philip Stinson, a Criminal Justice Professor at Bowling Green State University says “it's” difficult to prosecute officers charged with murder or manslaughter stemming from on-duty shootings because people often sympathize with police officers. Not only is it difficult to prosecute police officers, but relatively few officers are also ever charged with criminal wrongdoing or admonished in any way. A December 5, 2015, Chicago Sun-Times story speaks to this point when its crack reporters discovered that 208 consecutive police shootings resulted in zero disciplinary measures (Grimm 2015). Absent the courageous testimony of police officer witnesses or a mountain of forensic evidence, the shooting officer’s story will carry the day (Zimring 2017).
At an early age, Americans are indoctrinated with positive messages about the men and women in blue, messages that extol the virtues of police officers, prompting citizens to look favorably on police officers and to give them the benefit of the doubt. What’s more “the courts are very reluctant to second-guess the split-second divisions of police officers in potentially violent street encounters that might be life-or-death situations” (Thompson 2021). Stinson said, “They somehow seem to take everything that’s been presented in the case, in the trial, and just disregard the legal standard” (Thompson 2021). The decision not to hold officers accountable doesn’t rest solely with prosecutors, however. Police unions through strict negotiations that shield police officers from criminal liability or prosecution often make it nearly impossible to remove an officer from the force despite repeated shootings and other infractions.
The absence of external checks to police violence against Blacks emboldens some police officers to shoot to death, tase to death, choke to death, and murder with impunity. In A Preface to Democratic Theory Robert A. Dahl submits, “if unrestrained by external checks, any given individual or groups of individuals will tyrannize over others” (Dahl 1956, 6). Under these circumstances, is it any wonder that Blacks who survive a violent encounter with the police forego filing a complaint, believing that doing so is a waste of time? Odds are against the complaint gaining any traction. “For every complaint that’s filed, there’s at least five or more that aren’t,” says attorney Geraldine Green, former president of the Los Angeles Civil Service Commission (Turque et al. 1991, 32). Couple this with the long-standing practice of police officers planting weapons on the deceased in order to justify unlawful shootings, it should surprise no one, that for many Blacks in America, a police presence, does not elicit a sense of safety, security, and/or peace of mind, as is perhaps the case with many Whites. Given the frequency with which white police officers often trample upon the rights of Blacks, and without consequence, few can deny the fact that Black’s pursuit of liberty continues to remain out of reach.
Liberty as a natural and inalienable right
According to key enlightenment theorists, the right to liberty is universal, God-given, and part of a natural cosmic order, or natural law. Accordingly, as more and more people around the world claim their God-given right to liberty, tyranny and oppression will supposedly be pushed aside. Where Blacks in America are concerned, this hypothesis merits much rethinking. There is a large sector of whites for whom Blacks have never been nor ever will be fully accepted. Arnold Toynbee spoke to this point when he wrote that “in western Protestant societies, the first credential for acceptance is white skin. A man who happens to be born with a different skin color cannot hope to be accepted, whatever his spiritual or intellectual, moral, merits maybe” (Toynbee 1935, I, 224). In The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups by W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, a similar theme emerges. Warner and Srole write:
The racial groups are divergent biologically rather than culturally
. . . . Such physical attributes as dark skin, the epicanthic fold, or
kinky hair become symbols of status and automatically consign
their possessors to inferior status . . . . ( p. 285).
These observations, from the perspective of world history, are deeply rooted in the Enlightenment period. David Hume, the Scottish philosophy, considered one of the period’s great thinkers and scholars wrote of Blacks: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complexion than White, nor ever an individual existent in action or speculation” (Smith 2013). Immanuel Kant was equally dismissive and racist in his assessment of Blacks. When told of a Black man of letters he responded (we are paraphrasing here) that he suspected that the Jamaican Blacks man was the equivalent of a parrot who speaks a few words plainly, Kant continued that “this fellow was quite Black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid” (Smith 2013).
Furthermore, despite Abraham Lincoln’s claims that America “was conceived in Liberty,” the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, and political repression (by the state) of every movement designed to bring about racial equality suggests otherwise. It is true that the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights drew heavily from the Enlightenment thinkers: Montesquieu (1689-1755) contributed a republic dimension and Jean-Jacques Rosseau (1712-78), a democratic element. John Locke (1632-1704), on the other hand, a staunch proponent of liberty, was in many ways the guiding light for America’s Founding Fathers. Other intellectuals theorized about Liberty, but Locke was the first to build an entire system around it. Locke’s seminal works—An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, his Two Treatises of government, and his first, Letter Concerning Toleration read in terms that purportedly resonated with Thomas Jefferson and the men of his era. Men were created equal by God and endowed by Him with natural Rights; the earth was given to men by God in order to cultivate by their own endeavors so that each person could earn a right to property (“the chief end” of society) by the application of his labor to the improvement of nature, we were led to believe (Woolhouse 1998; Locke 1689).
There is evidence that suggests, what the framers wrote was not necessarily an accurate reflection of their true feelings, let alone their behavior. Jefferson wrote, for example, in Notes on the State of Virginia that Black people are “inferior to the Whites in the endowment both of body and mind” (Jefferson 1792). It has been said that although Jefferson owned slaves, he was very much aware that ownership of another human being was morally and ethically uncouth, even against God’s will. In fact, an earlier version of the Declaration of Independence of which he was principal author denounced slavery as “piratical warfare” and an “assemblage of horrors”, a “cruel war against human nature itself.” Legend has it that Jefferson and his colleagues were overruled by an angry opposition and strongly urged to strike such language, resulting in the “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ….” compromise (Lemon, 2021). In Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus (2019), the author refuses to give Jefferson a pass, arguing that “Jefferson was quick to condemn the British for having introduced North American slavery but temporized on finding a solution to the problem that he not only inherited but aggravated” (67). As it turns out, Jefferson was not the only founding father whose actions proved hypocritical, as it pertained to matters of liberty and justice for all, just the most prominent.
Locke maintained in his Two Treatises of Government that people have rights, such as life, liberty, and property, that are grounded in a foundation, independent of the laws of any particular society. He further argued that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. While Locke may have served as the inspiration to the nation’s Founding Fathers, it is clear that the Founding Fathers extrapolated selectively from his writings. Given Locke’s definition of Liberty, no nation, which has its origins in the massacre of Native Americans and the African Slave Trade can boast of being conceived in Liberty.
If Liberty is as Locke says it is—meaning, the state of being free within society from oppressed restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views, then Liberty remains, from the vantage point of many Blacks, a dream deferred. Many Blacks, from entertainers to academics, to professional athletes to layperson have admitted in interviews and on other venues that to live in America is to exist in a constant state of fear. Blacks have been shot by police officers walking down the street, jogging in a park, after being pulled over for minor traffic violations—if that—falling sleeping in one’s car, sleeping in one’s bed, or sitting on one’s couch while enjoying a bowl of ice cream. In other words, there is no place where Blacks can take safe refuge.
Conclusion
The list of intellectuals who have theorized about the ideals on which America’s most sacrosanct documents are based is endless. The different iterations offered up by various thinkers are, for the most part, striking in their similarity. For example, James Madison argued that government should be constructed so as to prevent majorities from invading the natural rights of minorities. What Madison didn’t account for is when the majorities are not the majorities per se, but representatives of the majorities who invade the natural rights of minorities. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill offers a more expansive treatise on government than Madison--one grounded in Liberty, which he maintains can be divided into three types, each of which must be recognized and respected by any free society (Mill 1859). First, there is the liberty of thought and opinion. Second, is the liberty of tastes and pursuits, or the freedom to plan our own lives. Third, there is the liberty to join other like-minded individuals for a common purpose that does not infringe on others. Each of these freedoms negates society’s propensity to compel compliance (Mill 1859). Still, Mill doesn’t go far enough, leaving at least one base unaccounted for. He says little about the liberty/freedom to be left alone, to be secure in one’s person while doing such mundane things and performing daily activities such as sleeping in one’s own bed while Black or toiling about in one’s own garage, shopping while Black or walking to school while Black or driving to work while Black and to be free from terror by state agents who are charged with keeping the peace, having taken an oath to protect and serve the citizenry, of which Blacks are a part. That said, drawing upon the work of Barrington Moore (1978), isn’t the misuse of the state’s instruments of violence against their own subjects an extreme violation of the obligation to keep the peace? Is not liberty, freedom, and justice for all the basis on which Democracy rests? E.E. Schattschneider, in The Semi-Sovereign People, maintained that “Democracy is something for ordinary people, a political system designed to be sensitive to the needs of ordinary people . . .” (Schattschneider 1960, 135). Does this not extend to Blacks in America? Or was Malcolm X correct when he said that when it comes to Blacks “America isn’t a democracy, it’s nothing but a hypocrisy?”
More, recently Naomi Wolf has gone so far as to opine that “Liberty is not a set of laws or a system of government; it is a state of mind” (Wolf 2008). If only that were true. Is it possible for Liberty to exist in the minds of Blacks in the absence of laws that actually protect them from state agent’s abuse of power? When America’s most powerful street-level bureaucrats (the police) are allowed to terrorize Black citizens by way of murder and to do so with impunity, doesn’t that preclude any sense of Liberty? In other words, aren’t Liberty and tyranny incompatible? Many years ago, in his book How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning Marable noted: “terror is not the product of violence alone, but is created only by the random, senseless and even bestial use of coercion against an entire population. The coercion that takes place within a “normal” capitalist society, the exploitation of Blacks in the workplace, is insufficient to modify and control their collective behavior” (Marable 1983, 118).
It appears, that as Blacks have become more incorporated into the country’s political, economic, and social life, the more hostile law enforcement behaves toward them. In fact, one wonders the degree to which the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States triggered latent hostility among whites, thus prompting the many shootings of unarmed Black citizens by white police officers who saw the killing of Blacks as a response to perceived Black progress. If Political Scientist Abraham L. Davis is correct when he submits that “it is reasonable to conclude that racism, indifference, the conspiracy of silence, and the double standard that is applied inside and outside of the courtroom have sent and will continue to send a signal to many white police officers that brutal acts against Black are acceptable” (Davis 1993), how is it possible then for Blacks to enjoy any semblance of Liberty, psychologically or otherwise? Although Locke has at times, over the course of history, been dismissed as an ideologue of the age of bourgeois revolutions, he is in many respects the thinker whose works are most relevant today, particularly as it pertains to Blacks and their elusive quest for Liberty. In fact, we maintain that Locke’s defense of the rights of humankind, especially on the matter of white police murder of unarmed Blacks, has taken on a new immediacy.
Judson L. Jeffries and Deanna Wilkinson are on faculty at the Ohio State University. Jerrell Beckham is a program coordinator in the Department of African American and African Studies.
Notes
[1] In the Southern region of the United States, however, most police forces were formed not on the “British model” but on a model related to the existence of slavery and racial oppression. Some of the initial policing institutions in the south were slave patrols charged with tracking down runaways and thwarting slave rebellions. Long before the London Metropolitan Police was formed, Southern cities such as New Orleans, Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, SC had paid full-time uniformed police officers who were tasked with preventing slave revolts and hunt down runaways. They were authorized to ride onto private property to ensure that slaves were not in possession of weapons or fugitives, conducting meetings, or learning to read or write. While most northern police forces operated outside the system of slavery, there were some such as the Boston Police Department that did engage in the business of returning escaped slaves to their owners in the south. It was not uncommon to see notices of warning strategically posted throughout the city cautioning the Colored People of Boston to avoid conversing with the city’s Watchmen and police officers as they were empowered to act as kidnappers and slave catchers. The 1851 notice continued, “Therefore, if you value your Liberty and the welfare of the fugitives among you, Shun them in every possible manner, as so many Hounds are on the track of the most unfortunate of your race.” (Catherine A. Paul, “Fugitive Slave Act of 1850”, socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/federal/fugitive-slave-act-of-1850/ accessed on March 3, 2021). The Fugitive Slave Acts were congressional statutes passed in the late 1700s and the mid-1800s that allowed for the capturing and return of runaway slaves that escaped one state and fled into another. While many northern police departments eschewed slave-catching, they nevertheless developed a pattern of policing that targeted Blacks.
[2] Even today, with the exception of Northern Ireland, few police officers in the UK carry guns while on the job.
[3] Given that America’s first public schools were founded in Boston, Massachusetts, not long after the first police department was formed there, it is likely that school children’s education included socialization in the life and duties of a police officer from the very beginning.
[4] The first such program began in Flint, Michigan in 1953.
[5] The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) is an education program that set out to prevent the use of narcotics, gang membership, and criminal activity.
[6] Police personnel implementing these programs were embedded in schools as “experts” in areas that they surely were not such as social work, drug abuse and prevention, child psychology, and behavior management. There was little debate or questioning of these expanded roles for law enforcement officers in public education or more broadly in the lives of American children. These steps and others heralded by politicians on both sides of the aisle expanded the criminal justice apparatus widening racial disparities in health, education, wealth, family stability, and other social indicators.
[7] In this article, the words Black and African American are used interchangeably according to sound and context as well as to avoid redundancy.
[8] See Sam Pollard (Director). The Talk: Race in America. Produced by Julie Anderson, 2017; 120 min.
[9] A poll tax, which began in the 1890s as a legal maneuver to keep Blacks from voting in southern states, was a fee that eligible voters were required to pay in order to vote. A grandfather clause exempted some poor whites from payment if they had a relative who had voted before the Civil War, but no exemptions were made for African Americans. In 1964 the 24th amendment prohibited the use of poll taxes for federal elections. Five states enforced the payment of poll taxes for state elections until 1966 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.
[10] Potential voters were required to read passages from either the U.S. Constitution or state constitution and explain to the voting registrar’s satisfaction in their own words what they just read. Whether or not applicants passed was left to the registrar’s discretion.
[11] A legal device that began in the 1920s prevented African Americans from participating in primary elections. Such a practice existed until the 1960s.
[12] Simply put, if one’s grandfather could vote prior to January 1, 1867, then you could vote as well. Because the former slaves were not granted the right to vote until the adoption of the 15th amendment in 1870, this clause effectively worked to preclude Blacks from voting and assured the vote of many impoverished and illiterate whites. In 1915 the U.S. Supreme Court declared the grandfather clause unconstitutional because it violated equal voting rights guaranteed by the 15th amendment.
[13] Charles Lynch, a Quaker, and a well-to-do political leader, and resident of what is known today as Lynchburg, Virginia invented the concept of lynching. During the American Revolution, Lynch and his fellow patricians were disturbed by the outbreak of crime. And because the nearest court was approximately two hundred miles away, these early frontier people decided to take legal matters into their own hands. Hence, the birth of lynching.
[14] At least 75% of the officers were white.
[15] In America, cellphones are plentiful. It is not uncommon for a single household to have several cell phones.
[16] Similarly, when Congress first began investigating the Ku Klux Klan in 1871, it was thought that “the Klan’s actions represented the common concerns of Southern whites who wished to preserve a racial hierarchy” (Hodes, 1993).
[17] Jennifer Carlson maintains that the state has the prerogative to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate violence, including that which is carried out by ordinary citizens in the private sphere. In the contemporary context, legitimate violence has included fatal acts by police officers under the guise of law and order and by private citizens in the name of self-defense (Carlson, 2020).
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